[Steve Bentley]

I can’t see the images (I get a “bad gateway” and they aren’t showing up under your profile) so I’ll take a guess.
Do you have a background solid in your comp? If so that will obliterate the alpha layer – basically making it a full frame white alpha which doesn’t help to key out your elements.
Depending on how you are generating your fractals (effect applied to a solid?) this might also not generate an alpha and you only get an alpha of the whole opaque solid. You may need a fractal generator that adds the fractal into the alpha channel too.

If you are getting an alph of some sort but just too closed in, you could try using another type of alpha. Make sure to set your output settings to RGB +alpha and millions+ (if using quicktime) and I personally prefer Straight instead of Premultiplied but it really depends on the content and your pipeline.
Keep in mind too that many of these QT formats are no longer allowed in AE 2017 and above.
Finally you could generate your fractal in black and white (or feed the fractal with a gray scale grad) and use that element as a luma matte and then run another pass with the fractal in color for the RGB element.

Re post the pics and we can help more.

[Steve Bentley]

The simplest is probably the Enable Time Remapping feature. Enable this for the clip in AE and then run down the timeline and click the keyframe icon (the little stopwatch) for the Enable Time Remapping effect on that layer for every frame you want to “freeze”. Then jump to each of those keyframes in turn, step back one frame and copy and paste the keyframe of the “frozen” frame prior to the keyframe you jumped to. So you will end up with two keyframes near every point you want to freeze (except the first one). Now, if you have your keyframe easing settings set to something odd you may have to force those keyframes to “hold” frames but you can do that all at once with a modifier key and a mouse click.
The idea here is that the keyframe, on say frame 20, will hold until there is another keyframe with the same information in it, say twenty frames later, before switching to a new hold keyframe on the very next frame. And you can manually change the information in those keyframes by double clicking on a keyframe and entering a new number. That number is the frame number of the clip you want displayed at that point in time.

[Steve Bentley]

Yes try making those changes in C4D (all the instructions were based on that) and then try exporting again in both OBJ and FBX and see how Form sees them then.

[Steve Bentley]

Good idea Andrew – just animate the hue offset through 360 degrees of offset.

[Steve Bentley]

You have to pick the attribute within the null and add the expression to that (in this case “position”) just select the layer and hit the p button.

[Steve Bentley]

It really depends on whats in that 2 minutes – we just did a two minute piece in AE that took 4 days to render – with 24 cores in the machine!

The problem with rendering C4D from inside AE is that AE doesn’t like to share resources, so IMHO its better to use Cineware to line up the shot and then render elements in C4d and bring them in as frames.

As for Mac or PC, its really your preference. You get more bang for your speed demon buck on a PC but you get the headache of which gfx card works with AE and your motherboard well. And apple really hasn’t put much development into their boxes of late – that new round of laptops aren’t any faster than ones from 4 years ago.
On the Mac side you have about 10 gfx card to pick from and many of those are glued to the mother board (read: slow). On the PC though you can go crazy.
There are lots of threads here (some of them heated) on which is best and which cards are best for AE. In the end get the biggest fastest most robust you can afford – as soon as you buy it another one will obsolete it for half the price.

[Steve Bentley]

Don’t forget you can now (as of AE2017 I think) just leave stuff in C4D and have AE render that file live using the original C4D file as a layer.

[Steve Bentley]

You might also need to subdivide your inner most object (either by making it editable or by upping the divisions in the spline and the extrude) otherwise you might get “bent” polys from certain deformers. It all depends on whether the deformer subdivides before or after the warp.

[Steve Bentley]

Is there a reason you are using Pro to render? You can add a motion blur tag to only the objects you want to blur but you may have to go back to the standard render for that. (we don’t use Pro because it takes waaaaaay too long).
You can also render out the blur separately with an object ID (multichannel format like EXR) and then extract the blur in post from only the objects you want blurred.

[Steve Bentley]

For sand don’t use a sphere – too many polys to figure out. You can use either a pyramid shape (4 sided included base) or a platonic with 5 or 6 sides or a flat square that always faces camera. Platonics are nice because they are slightly asymmetrical so they don’t end up looking like a lot of triangles or squares and because of their shape they will hook together like sand does.
You can also tell the dynamics collision engine to use a simpler “stunt” shape (like a single vertex poly) to determine when things run into each other. This reduces the time needed to calculate the physics.

And most of all don’t use a sphere that hasn’t been collapsed to be editable. If you use a perfect sphere (the primitive from C4D) it has in theory infinite polys because it will always render smooth no matter how close you get. On top of that, because its not polys the physics engine has trouble calculating when one poly hits another.

Better still you could use a particle system that just impacts on the glass itself and not on other sand particles. If you get enough of them going it acts like a fluid as is flows and you don’t notice that they aren’t bouncing off each other and just bouncing off the glass.
Don’t just rely on the geometry of the glass to create that pinch point at the apex. Use a force node to slow them down as they pass through, either with friction or with a physics time function.